Houston Rockets: Three front court players to target before trade deadline

There’s two weeks to go before the NBA trade deadline and the Houston Rockets need to make a move. Here are three guys that can help this team asap. Look.

The Houston Rockets are amazingly staying afloat despite missing the likes of Chris Paul and Clint Capela but that’s because of the amazing heroics of one James Harden, who is single-handedly helping this team winning basketball games.

Harden’s franchise record-breaking, 61-point, 15-rebound performance while going to the free throw line 30 times certainly warrants the discussion of how much help this Houston Rockets team needs to complement the path of greatness that this basketball player is taking.  He’s getting to rarefied air and I’m extremely concerned on how his body is going to hold up from all of this production.

With the uncertainty of Paul and Capela returning any time soon, the team still can salvage a season that was much expected to be a continuation of last season’s 65-win success.  It has been a glorified game of catch-up for this team, finally immersing themselves back into the conversation of being a playoff team once again.

There were doubts in mind back in early December if this team would have the ability to get it together but they’ve been able to remain resilient despite their defensive prowess taking a nosedive from last season’s performance.

The Houston Rockets have gone 15-6 since Harden has had to take the load for Paul/Capela and the alarming aspect they’re 4-4 in the last eight games, certainly indicating that this historic performance of Harden’s is starting to wear on him.

Has Daryl Morey created too much of workload for James Harden?  Take a listen to the latest episode of Houston Sports Talk, a homegrown podcast:

Although the team failed to come to terms with solid contributor Danuel House on the expiring portion of his two-way contract, the team made sound moves by signing Austin Rivers and Kenneth Faried off waivers.

But these players aren’t enough and the Houston Rockets will need to make at least one trade for another front court guy that can hold things down defensively, snag a few boards and hit the open shot when warranted.

Offense has not been a problem for this team as they’re still 2nd in the league in efficiency — 111.2 points per 100 possessions — but they’ve falling from as high as 6th in 2017-18 to 25th (109.5 per 100) in terms of defensive efficiency on the other side of the ball.

The team needs guys that will be able to help right that ship and there’s a few out there that aren’t hard on the team’s pocketbook, which has gone into bonus rounds with the team’s expected $12.4 million luxury tax bill for this season.

The Houston Rockets do have a $1.5 million trade exception in their back pocket with the swap they made to move Carmelo Anthony‘s salary off the books so it would be very handy for the guys I’m about to talk about.

The team should look to either include late second-round picks at the most — and even that’s too much — cash or the rights to a player that has potential to have impact on any given trade partner’s roster.

So here are three guys that the Houston Rockets could reasonably make a deal for and could provide a long-term benefit in the future.

Let’s take a look.